Trumpism Lives On in Corey Stewart’s Campaign for the Virginia Senate

Stewart is both an icon of proto-Trumpism and already, in Virginia, a political relic.

Photograph by Matt Eich for The New Yorker

Virginia’s Senate race won’t be watched particularly closely tonight. The Democratic Senator Tim Kaine is widely expected to beat the Republican Corey Stewart, who has lagged well behind Kaine in the polls for over a year and seems likely to take about a third of the vote. Kaine owes his advantage, in large part, to demographic changes and a suburban turn away from the Republican Party, particularly in Northern Virginia, which have brought Democrats repeated victories over the past decade in the formerly rock-red state.

Stewart has managed to survive those shifts as the chief executive of the board of supervisors in Prince William County, a locality on the edge of Northern Virginia. In 2007, he successfully championed the passage of measures barring undocumented immigrants in the county from receiving some public services and requiring local police to check the immigration status of criminally accused people whom they suspected to be undocumented. Those measures coincided with a national debate on immigration reform, and eventually earned Stewart a national profile as a kind of square-jawed, suit-and-tie Joe Arpaio. In 2010, he was invited on Fox News to comment on Arizona’s immigration crackdown, and offered encouragement to nativists in that state. “We had thousands of people boycotting our county, protesting our board meetings, the Washington Post claimed that I was a third-world despot,” he said. “We had every other charge levelled against us, but, in the end, we passed it.”

Now, at fifty, Stewart is both an icon of proto-Trumpism—“I was Trump before Trump was Trump,” he boasted, in 2016—and already, in Virginia, a political relic. The signature issue of his campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination last year was the protection of Confederate flags and statues. This was an odd matter for Stewart to take up, given that he, like Tim Kaine, was born in Minnesota. In early 2017, Stewart appeared at an event hosted by the white nationalist Jason Kessler, who was then campaigning against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville, and went on to stage the Unite the Right rally. In the aftermath of the rally, Stewart criticized Republicans who condemned the participants—“They played right into the hands of the left wing,” he told the Washington Post.

Stewart visits the home of Evelyn Hill, an eighty-nine-year-old supporter.

Photograph by Matt Eich for The New Yorker

As much as Northern Virginia and the state’s other suburbs have changed, Stewart’s politics still play well in places like Augusta County—a locality about thirty miles from the West Virginia border that went for Donald Trump by forty-nine points in 2016. On Thursday night, at the county’s government center, in the town of Verona, Stewart seemed perfectly at home speaking to an older, white crowd in front of the board of supervisors’ dais.

“I know that you normally go and you pick up that remote and you click on Fox News,” he said. “I know you normally do. But, every once and a while, don’t you peek over to MSNBC?”

There were jocular jeers and laughter.

“But, election night, I want you to tune into CNN. I want you to tune into CNN and watch as Don Lemon announces that Virginia has fallen and we’ve taken it back!”

After the cheering subsided, Stewart began taking questions from the audience. A woman who looked to be in her sixties asked him how he intended to combat drug trafficking in the region.

“There are over seven hundred thousand local and state law-enforcement officials,” he replied. “Seven hundred thousand of them. We only have, however, ten thousand immigration customs-enforcement officials. Ten thousand in the whole country. It’s not enough. The only way that we’re ever going to be able to identify, arrest, and remove and deport the criminal illegal aliens who are involved in this trade of meth and fentanyl and heroin and human trafficking is to require every police force in this state, every sheriff’s department, every jail, to coöperate with federal authorities.” (According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, there are twenty thousand officials employed.)

The crowd cheered.

Another question came from an elderly man in the back of the room, speaking in a pronounced drawl.

“What’s your view on teaching children transgender in the public schools?”

“Yeah, it’s disgusting,” Stewart responded. There were murmurs of approval. “It’s disgusting. You know, they are forcing children in Virginia—it’s starting in California, and everything that starts in California eventually makes its way here—children as young as five years old are learning about these issues, and it’s wrong. And I think it’s very clear that that should not ever be taught in our schools.”

After the event ended, Wendell Walker, the western vice-chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, stuck around to mingle with voters. “When you come out here to this part of Virginia, we’re still very conservative,” he told me. “So we pretty much know how to live right, we don’t like government in our lives. Corey’s going to do well because he knows how to connect with the voters, the issues. Tonight was a home run, as far as I’m concerned. And who would have ever thought that a Virginia election is going to come down to the wall?”

He went on to reference the migrant caravan headed for the border—a group of about five thousand people, fleeing poverty and violence, that has become a target for President Trump’s fear-mongering about undocumented immigrants.

“In my lifetime, I would have never thought that the United States would be invaded,” Walker said. “And that’s basically what it is.”

Anne Seaton, of the Republican Women of Greater Augusta, chimed in. “In Sweden—they’re a very progressive nation—or in Canada, you have to have marketable skills, and they’re looking for people to add to the value of the society there, who want to wave the flag and be grateful for the opportunity,” she said.

Near the front of the room, John Lutz, who was wearing a green T-shirt, basketball shorts, and a camo hat, animatedly rattled off a string of theories about Antifa (“And guess who backs Antifa? NAMBLA. The North American Man-Boy Love Association, O.K.?”) and recent mass shootings (“Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, no bodies, no bodies, no bodies”) to a small group of stragglers, including a family with young children. This culminated in a defense of the former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, a Republican who was accused of assaulting girls as young as fourteen. (Roy Moore denied the allegations.) “Even if he dated young girls, at the time that he did, the legal age to be married at that time was fifteen,” Lutz said. “We’re not talking about seven- or eight-year-olds like Mohammed did, O.K.?” Lutz said that he drives a white van around the area spreading these truths to those willing to listen. “I’ve gotten lots of thumbs-up,” he said. “A couple of fingers, too.”

“I try to be brash and bold right in your face,” he continued. “That’s what Corey does. And that’s what Trump does. And people aren’t used to that. I grew up under Reagan. Reagan was that way.”

Jimmy Marvin, who works at a Walmart distribution center, was a more conventional Stewart supporter. He said that abortion and immigration—“You can’t help your neighbor until you’ve got your own house in order”—were among the issues preventing him from considering Kaine. But he talked, too, about Obamacare and his skepticism of Kaine’s Medicare-X public-option plan. “When Obamacare kicked in, I got kicked off a twenty-dollar co-pay to a two-thousand-six-hundred-dollar deductible,” Marvin said. “So I went from ‘Great!’ to ‘Holy cow, I’m never going to meet this deductible unless I’ve got an emergency.’ So why would I support that?”

Obamacare isn’t the crux of Stewart’s closing argument, of course. Like Republicans across the country, he’s leaned into fears about the migrant caravan. “Thousands headed our way,” he said in a recent ad. “If that caravan isn’t stopped, the thousands will become millions, overwhelming hospitals, schools, social services, and law enforcement.” That’s not a message likely to swing voters with other concerns and to carry the day for him tonight. But it is a message Stewart has prepared himself well to deliver.

As the public has become aware of the spiralling costs associated with building a new Foxconn plant in the state, the deal has become something of a political liability for the governor.

At a rally on Sunday, the President spent little time speaking about Kemp, though he did say, after telling the crowd that Georgia “is winning like never before,” that “this man will take it to heights like you wouldn’t believe.”